Fish Out of Water

Today, I was the most dressed up than I ever have been in my entire life. Express shirt and tie, Macy's Alfani pants and shoes, a navy blue blazer, a top coat and scarf. And I get to do this for the next 3 and half months.

And then I got to my internship...

30 minutes in, I'm in a meeting regarding linking new mobility and resilience/national security. I really had no idea what was going on. Luckily I was just observing because my project leader was hosting the meeting and I was just following him.

I'm actually helping with the Center's "Mobilizing NATO in Afghanistan and Pakistan: Ensuring the Alliance's Future" project. They are set to roll out their findings in a paper which is being released later in January before the large NATO summit at the end of the month. Apparently we're having some big names come to this event we're hosting. For instance my project leader's "need to contact" list includes Gen. McChrystal and SecDef Gates. Don't know if their actually coming, but my project leader, who went to Harvard and is probably no more than five years older than me apparently has a contact list consisting of the previously mentioned, Madeleine Albright, Ahmad Rashid (whose book I read over break) and apparently many others.

He told me that I'll really gain a broad perspective of the whole Af-Pak/Central Asia situation from interning here and that despite not getting paid I will be pretty much a full time employee. If I wanted to gain knowledge of everything going on over there (which I said I was) he said this was the perfect place to intern. Sounds like right off the bat I'll get to do some follow up phone calls to some of the policy experts checking to see if they are coming to this "roll out" that we're conducting come late January. The center said interns will be doing about 60% policy work and 40% clerical which I think sounds great.

Really all today I did was reading on the reports they have been writing up so I could catch up. What they are presenting is an assessment of the capabilities NATO members have yet to commit to Afghanistan. It'll also show the danger posted by al-Qaeda and other extremist organizations that operate out of South Asia. "By putting the threat of domestic terrorism and large regional instability within the context of the effort in Afghanistan, the Center hopes to provide a necessary impetus for greater European political and popular support for NATO deployments."

From what Ryan, the project leader, talked about, logistics for this event in January is at the top of the Center's priorities. He even joked (maybe he was serious) that I probably would be putting the whole event together. Though I may be conducting research for the project; there is still more to go, I'll probably be helping with the event.

Everyone was really nice and ironically I was handed coffee at the beginning of the day. My first impressions were that I will be legitimately helping out the Center and what they are trying to accomplish. At the same time, I'm really jumping in mid-stream and everyone was really busy today. Ryan said after this week things should slow down. Nevertheless it was intimidating and it'll take some time for me to adjust. But I think it'll go well and I'll enjoy it immensely. Hopefully I'll get to steal their big report and get to meet some big names. We'll see.

On another note for the I'm sure many history buffs who are reading this blog, Dr. David Abshire, whom I met today, leads the center. He's co-chairing this project too because he has experence successfully confronting the political crisis within NATO that was created by the Soviet SS-20 missile deployment and NATO's failure to meet conventionl force requirements during the 1980s. There's a fun fact.

Any the way, I can't wait to get a couple more days under my belt so I can get a better understanding of what's going on and what to do. Cya for now.